Tuesday
17
August
2010

Excited about Surge 2010

I’m getting excited about the speaker list at Surge 2010. Lots of top talent, and all will be talking about challenges faced, mistakes made, and lessons learned in building scalable systems. I am particularly looking forward to hearing Bryan Cantrill talk about building enterprise solutions from commodity components, which is a big part of what I do at OmniTI.

Bryan has some fascinating stories from his days at Sun Microsystems, and he’s an amazing speaker who has been described as “Tigger on speed”. I’m hoping for a reprise of his characterization of a hard drive that unexpectedly reset when a high LBA was requested.

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Tuesday
4
May
2010

Headed to Velocity 2010

I’m planning to attend Velocity 2010. I’ve never been before, and I’m looking forward to learning new things and meeting new people. Devops is a popular term, and we live it at OmniTI, so I’m excited about bringing back knowledge to improve it in our operations and development teams.

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Tuesday
27
April
2010

TRON Powered by Solaris?

  • Posted by esproul at 15:08:24  //   // 
  • Solaris

Dennis Clarke noticed something interesting in a trailer for Disney’s upcoming TRON Legacy movie. A glimpse of an “old” computer interface shows what looks like a window running “top” and another window containing a semblance of “uname -a” from a Solaris machine.

Reminds me of spotting nmap in Matrix Reloaded.

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Tuesday
27
April
2010

R.I.P. Floppy Disk

  • Posted by esproul at 00:16:00  //   // 

Sony has announced that it is ending production of the venerable 3.5” floppy disk. Additional coverage at Ars Technica.

Things like this cause me to wax nostalgic (a sure sign of advancing age, at least in Internet terms,) but I’ll simply recall that my first OS (MS-DOS) came on something like 3-4 floppies. We also thought the boot-sector viruses that often rode around on floppies were a terrible scourge. If only we’d known what was to come.

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